The frozen lake cracked beneath his feet. He felt the vibrations of the ice on the water as the sound of the crack bellowed in the icy depths below. The sting from the panic shooting through the inside of his body overtook the piercing pain from the cold against his naked and exposed skin.


He looked up from the panic producing cracked ice to the endless white horizon, “still so far to go,” he thought to himself. Looking back down at the veins of breaking ice, he felt his heart beating hard and fast and more panic surfaced within him. He couldn’t tell if he was shivering from the cold or shivering from the fear of being submerged in the daggers of a painfully subfreezing ultra cold death.


For a moment he stopped shivering as every muscle in his body tensed with his next move. Shifting his weight from one leg carefully to the other without lifting a foot ever so slowly, he strained his ears to listen to the faintest cracks and bellows. 


Nothing.


He exhaled and felt his body relax a little. Moving his foot forward, scooting it ever so gently across the ice, he continued forward, clutching his abdomen to try to keep some sort of warmth in his core.

The ice stayed together as he made his way across the frozen lake towards the forest on the other side. “If I can just get to the forest,” he kept thinking to himself for motivation, “I know I’ll be safe to rest. I need to make it to the forest.”


Gliding, step by step, the arctic wind penetrated his lungs with each cold constricted breath. As exhaustion began to take over him, he barely had the strength to continue when the wind picked up and began to sweep across the tundra. Starving and hypothermic, he gave in to the wind and crumbled onto the ice which broke beneath the collapsing weight of him.


The sound of the ice finally breaking way and giving him over to the water below shocked him back into survival mode as his arms began flailing and clutching onto whatever chunks of ice he could grab.

Hours ago, he lost the feeling in his legs from the knee down, but now, they were hurting, burning from the arctic water. He tried to kick to start swimming but instead of his legs going through the water they went down with a thud and hit the ground. He stopped his struggle and was feeling around in the liquid with his hands.


The ground! It really is the ground! He was in the shallows.


“Oh, thank God, thank the freakin Universe!” He jolted with hope. With every bit of strength he could muster, he scrambled to lift himself out of the water. Before his eyes could adjust to the tree line, he began to run.


Beyond the tree line, out of the wind and away from the ice, he stopped running. The thick forest blocked out the sky enough for the ground to be free of snow amongst the trees. The soft earth beneath his blackened feet was a welcomed relief as he continued clutching his abdomen for warmth.


He knew he wouldn’t be able to make a fire before daylight, so his next choice was to attempt to make a shelter for the few remaining hours of darkness or continue walking. He let his feet decide and they continued to shuffle through the forest floor.


On and on, he placed one foot in front of the other in a sort of rhythmic motion, a sort of slumped shuffling. His body had been numb for hours and now his mind had joined it. Autopilot in survival mode, he kept making his way through the forest until he heard an echoing crack followed by the sound of a snow pile crushing through branches and thwacking the ground with a clomp.


The sound startled him to a stop and he clenched his eyes shut. Triggered by the crack, for a brief moment, he thought he was back on the frozen lake and a rush of panic waved through him, prickling his skin and bringing back some feeling to his body.


For the first time in hours, he unwrapped his arms from around his abdomen and brought them up to his face to rub his eyes. The cold air immediately began to infiltrate the warm flesh newly exposed. The shivering made his body feel like it was vibrating, or maybe that was the exhaustion kicking in again.


He squinted his eyes open, afraid of what he was about to find.


A sigh of relief escaped his frosty lips in a white cloud as he looked upon a clearing in the trees ahead. Twilight peaked through. The sun was coming up.


The clearing in the trees wasn’t too far ahead. When he got to it, the sun was making it’s way above the horizon and snow birds were emerging from the warmth of their nests. Life had awoken and survived the long winter night.


A giant tree trunk, glistening in the sun as the rays steamed away the frost off the moss, beckoned him to take rest. He sat on the soft earth and leaned against the ancient trunk.


Sitting in the sun, he felt the blood in his body begin to warm up again. In the light, he could see now, see what they had done to him before they left him by the lake to die. His left leg was from the mill worker. His right leg was from the pig farmer. His torso was from the man they had just hung two weeks ago. Both arms came from cadavers. The hands were different, too. Who’s hands were these? 


“No. No! It can’t be true?!” The first words he had spoken out loud in days. He flinched at the sound of the voice. His eyes went wide. With a stranger’s hand he hesitantly reached up to his head. Touching the lips, the cheeks, the eyes, and then, he felt the hair, her hair.


Tears began to pour from his new eyes. “No, not her.”